Postwar Modern:
Exhibition highlights

Get a different perspective on some of the standout pieces of our five star exhibition – with selections from Gallery Assistant David Corbett, Music Programmer Chris Sharp, Assistant Exhibition Organiser Rita Duarte, Assistant Curator Hilary Floe, Art Gallery Apprentice Eve Scott and Assistant Curator Charlotte Flint.

‘Snake’ – David Medalla, Sand Machine (1963)

‘Is something a matter with it? Is it broken?’
Poor old burr, trundling round your little birch maypole,
ploughing shallow grooves into powdery perpetuity.
Injured, precarious ‘ever so slightly wonky’ contraption.

A glint beneath your patina lures them
astray from the ‘recommended curatorial route’.
Into the alcove, were you bewilder, mystify and transfix,
with that entertaining, gyrating you do.

Oh Snake! Your endearing travesty enlivens my sentry,
if I had an atrium, there you would dwell,
shimmying about in the sunlight.
So what, if your erroneous voltage causes abrupt reversals of polarity?

Oh Snake!
Thou art a joy to invigilate!

David Corbett, Casual Gallery Assistant

Anthony Hill, Relief Construction (1956)

So much of the work in Postwar Modern seems to be processing violence and destruction. There are photographs that that document the physical aftermath of conflict and contorted objects that channel the emotional repercussions. But this sleek, otherworldly object seems instead to gaze blithely into a serene and barely-imagined future.

If you take a pace sideways, you can see, across the gallery, grimy post-war streets captured by Roger Mayne. Hill’s work exists on another plane - measured, glossy, uninflected, aloof. Clean lines speak of certainty, polished surfaces of modernity. But there is magic here, too – in the unfocused pool of liquid colour that spills, reflected, from the copper rectangle inside the case out onto the floor beyond. It’s a portal, a phase shift, a trick of the light somehow conjured out of measured, mathematical sobriety. Another quiet disorientation in an exhibition full of them.

From Chris Sharp, Music Programmer

Magda Cordell, #8 (1960)

As you make your way through the gallery, Cordell’s #8 emerges in an explosion of colour – against an enviable electric blue background, a strange figure in a strange postwar universe. One is immediately captivated by its vitality: this body of muddled colours and shapes has a striking resemblance with a pulsating heart, breathing life into an otherwise bleak landscape.

Equally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it also shows signs of healing – glowing bursts of expanding, regenerative energy – which to me feels so powerful and hopeful, especially under the current climate. Anecdotally, we discovered that the painting needed some TLC when we unpacked it – rather fitting that it would come back to London for much needed restoration!

Rita Duarte, Assistant Exhibition Organiser

Aubrey Williams, Rock and Shadow (1963)

Rock and Shadow is one of the smallest works in our section ‘Strange Universe’, which revolves around fantastical re-imaginings of the human body, but for me it’s one of the exhibition’s most powerful and enigmatic moments. Aubrey Williams was born and raised in Guyana when it was still a British colony, and his time working as an agricultural officer in remote parts of the country instilled him with a deep respect for indigenous traditions and their intimate relationship to the landscape. Having moved to London in 1952 to build a career as an artist, he found himself haunted by the forms and politics of his native land. In the early 1960s, he created a series of paintings which fuse allusions to Guyana’s volcanic landscapes with forms suggesting human fingers or organs. Awash in heady colour, body and land provocatively interpenetrate, leaving dribbles and crusts on the surface of the canvas. Sensuously beautiful but also marked by violence, Rock and Shadow speaks to me of an intense longing for home in a time of ongoing colonial oppression.

Hilary Floe, Assistant Curator

Gillian Ayres, Break-Off (1961)

My favourite piece in Postwar Modern is Gillian Ayres' 'Break-off'. Perhaps this is because I spent so long looking at this image on our invitations when prepping for our Private View, but there is something so comforting yet alive about the piece. The acidic mustard really energises the painting, and I love the sweet calming contrast of the pinks.

The movement of the brush-strokes, the bleeding out and continuation of each colour leads me to wander 'what happens next?', nothing is stagnant or finished nor kept neatly between the lines. I'm sure one thing taken from the Postwar period is the need to continue, move forward and break away. The blue and red circle at the top echoes to me the Mod scene, perhaps a taste of what is on the horizon...

Eve Scott, Art Gallery Apprentice

William Turnbull, Standing Female Figure (1957)

Coolly surveying the gallery, William Turnbull’s Standing Female Figure (1957) is a commanding presence. Upright and totemic she seizes your attention, the beautifully textured surface seeming at once ancient and contemporary.

Several of Turnbull’s sculptures bear this remarkable weathered surface; forms looking almost as though they have been excavated from a long-gone civilisation. In an artist’s statement from 1956, he remarked that: ‘sculpture used to look "modern"; now we make objects that might have been dug up at any time during the past forty thousand years’. Referencing primeval fertility figures and weather-beaten goddess statues, for me Standing Female Figure beautifully represents the enduring presence and importance of the female form throughout history.

Charlotte Flint, Assistant Curator